Subject: New UCL vic release (vic-2.8ucl-1.0)

From: "Piers O'Hanlon" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 11:19:59 +0100

Hi folks,

We are proud to release the new version vic-2.8ucl-1.0.

Vic was developed by LBL as a video conferencing tool to facilitate video 
conferencing over the Internet. This can be between two participants directly, 
or between a group of participants on a common multicast group. No special 
features are required to use VIC in point to point mode, but to use the 
multiparty conferencing facilities of VIC, all participants must reside on a 
portion of the Internet which supports IP multicast. VIC is based on IETF 
standards, using RTP above UDP/IP as its transport protocol, and conforming to 
the RTP profile for audio and video conference with minimal control.

Vic provides a range of video codecs (H.261 Intra, H.263, H.263+, jpeg, bvc, 
cellb, nv, nvdct) from a number of different contributers.
It runs on a range of platforms: Solaris, IRIX, Linux, FreeBSD3.2 and Windows 
95/98/NT.

At UCL we have continued the development of vic (from LBL) and are releasing a 
new version (vic2.8ucl-1.0)

With the following additions, since vic2.8ucl5 (an experimental release):
- Reorganised code into directory structure reflecting the functionality of
  the different modules of vic - in a style not disimilar to MASH. 
- Moved vic over to use UCL's version's of tcl/tk - this is due to a number of 
   problems we have encountered here; The variety of versions of tcl/tk
  installed on target machines can be very wide and therefore provides us with 
  a multitude of bugs and 'problems' that are not related to our code. We
  now ship the code now with UCL statically linkable version of tcl/tk (which  
  also uses compiled in versions of the 'init' scripts as opposed to system
  installed which also lead to trouble) to minimise such problems. It is still 
  possible to get vic to use the standard libraries by specifying 
  -without-ucltk, and/or -without-ucltcl (though we cannot offer much help 
with
  problems created by different tcl/tk versions). 
- Moved vic over to use UCL's common library so it shares the codebase 
provided   by rat - where possible; It now uses common DES code and
  Mbus code - so both the DES and Mbus sections have been re-written.
- The meteor grabber has been fixed (using the source from the freeBSD 
version)
  for FreeBSD and vic now compiles under FreeBSD. 
- A number of useful fixes for the video4linux grabber plus new control panel 
  from Jean-Marc Orliaguet 
- IPv6 support under UNIX and WIN32. Under UNIX this enabled by specifiying 
the
  --enable-ipv6 directive to configure. We have tested it with
  Solaris 7 ipv6, Linux 2.2.5 ipv6 kernel support. 
- Created an MS Visual C++ 6.0 project for compilation of vic under win32 
  environments - this also, unfortunately, meant we had to rename all C++
  files from .cc to .cpp. The project has a number of different configuration  
  choices; Debug, Release, Debug_IPv6 (Microsoft research's IPv6 -
  requiring NT 4.0, MS ipv6 version 1.3 and MS DDK), Debug_IPv6-Musica (a  
  non-free ipv6 implementation from Thompson-CSF). 
- Now IPv6 host addresses and multicast addresses are automatically recognised 
  and vic will attempt to use IPv6 (if compiled in). 

We look forward to any feedback, bug reports, patches and comments on
experience. 

More information, including download instructions, is available from
http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/software

Please send all feedback to [email-masked]

Piers O'Hanlon/Kris Hasler
Networked Multimedia Group
University College London